A communication network may include network elements that route packets through the network. Communications networks often have Internet Protocol (IP) backbones, which often include many routers to route and forward network traffic to the various network elements. Network elements are often sparsely coupled in a network, and a significant portion of traffic may be communicated between network elements that do not have direct IP adjacency—such traffic must pass through one or more intermediate IP routers. However, router ports are often considered the most “expensive” ports in an IP architecture in terms of cost of establishing and maintaining a network, particularly in networks utilizing wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) or similar optical communication technology.
Traffic grooming is the process of grouping many small telecommunications flows into larger units, which may be processed as single entities. For example, in a network using WDM, two network flows which are destined for a common node can be placed on the same wavelength, allowing them to be dropped by a single optical add-drop multiplexer. Often the objective of grooming is minimizing the cost of the network.
Although traffic grooming has been utilized to reduce the costs of implementing communications networks, such approaches do not permit traffic grooming at multiple layers of a network, thus limiting effectiveness of these traditional approaches to traffic grooming.